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By David Streitfeld &Melissa EddyThe New York Times • Saturday May 24, 2014 7:32 AM

Amazon’s power over the publishing and bookselling industries is unrivaled in the modern era.
Now it has started wielding that might in a more brazen way than ever before.

Seeking ever-higher payments from publishers to bolster its anemic bottom line, Amazon is
holding books and authors hostage on two continents by delaying shipments and raising prices. The
literary community is fearful and outraged — and practically begging for government
intervention.

“How is this not extortion? You know, the thing that is illegal when the Mafia does it,” said
Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House, echoing remarks being made across social media.

The battle is being waged largely over physical books. In the United States, Amazon has been
discouraging customers from purchasing titles from Hachette, the fourth-largest publisher by market
share. Late Thursday, it escalated the dispute by making it impossible to order Hachette’s
forthcoming books. It is using some of the same tactics against the Bonnier Publishing Group in
Germany.

But the real prize is not the physical books. It is control of e-books, the future of
publishing. Amazon is by far the dominant e-book company and feels it deserves more of the digital
proceeds than it is getting. The publishers, contemplating a slide into irrelevance, if not
nonexistence, are trying to hold the line.

Late yesterday afternoon, Hachette made by far its strongest comment on the conflict.

“We are determined to protect the value of our authors’ books and our own work in editing,
distributing and marketing them,” said Sophie Cottrell, a Hachette senior vice president. “We hope
this difficult situation will not last a long time, but we are sparing no effort and exploring all
options.”

James Patterson, one of the country’s best-selling writers, described the confrontation between
Amazon and the publishers as “a war” in a Facebook post titled “Four of the most important
paragraphs I’ll ever write.”

“Bookstores, libraries, authors, and books themselves are caught in the cross fire of an
economic war,” he wrote. “If this is the new American way, then maybe it has to be changed — by
law, if necessary — immediately, if not sooner.”

Patterson is published by Hachette. His forthcoming novels are now impossible to buy from Amazon
in either print or digital form.

Amazon is, as usual, staying mum. “We talk when we have something to say,” Jeffrey P. Bezos, the
founder and chief executive, said at the company’s annual meeting this week.

The retailer began refusing orders late Thursday for coming Hachette books, including J.K.
Rowling’s new novel, published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

In some cases, even the webpages promoting the books have disappeared. Anne Rivers Siddons’ new
novel,
The Girls of August, coming in July, no longer has a page for the physical book or even
the Kindle edition. Only the audio-player edition is still being sold (for more than $60).
Otherwise it is as if it doesn’t exist.